# Breadcrumbs microformat for SEO
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [April 9, 2014, 10:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634 "2014-04-09T22:26:47Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@angelim](https://meta.discourse.org/u/angelim)
#### Post date: [April 9, 2014, 10:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/1 "2014-04-09T22:26:47Z")
Given the url structure Discourse uses, Google has little hints about the hierarchy of the forum. How about adopting the microdata for breadcrumbs? Discourse already has the categories in the right order rendered in the posts page.
I don’t have any articles to indicate if ranking improves. One of the advantages is to allow the user to get to a particular category from the search results. The breadcrumbs replace the link, just bellow the title.
[Implementation](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en) with microdata is trivial:
```plaintext
```
My fork points to a private repo out of Github so I don’t know how to send a pull request. Is anyone interested in implementing this?
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [April 9, 2014, 11:30pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/2 "2014-04-09T23:30:33Z")
If it is just markup, then probably fine as a pull request.
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### Author:  [@robbo](https://meta.discourse.org/u/robbo)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2015, 3:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/3 "2015-02-10T03:54:56Z")
Has anything happened on this front?
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### Author:  [@fantasticfears](https://meta.discourse.org/u/fantasticfears)
#### Post date: [February 12, 2015, 7:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/4 "2015-02-12T19:14:02Z")
This is interesting. Discourse serves plain pages for crawlers. For now, it doesn’t include these.
1. I do want to know whether it’s eligible to add metadata to only these pages, excluding the handlebar templates. You know, Google spider can understand JavaScript…
2. I prefer RDFa since I heard it all the time. It seems solid.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [February 12, 2015, 8:48pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/5 "2015-02-12T20:48:58Z")
Yes, the crawler pages can be updated independently of everything else. It is quite safe (as long we don’t break crawling.. that’d be very bad).
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### Author:  [@fantasticfears](https://meta.discourse.org/u/fantasticfears)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2015, 11:37am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/6 "2015-02-13T11:37:56Z")
I followed some blog posts on webmaster. Google prefers `microdata` now.
PR:
[https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/3199](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/3199)
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [June 13, 2015, 9:19pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/7 "2015-06-13T21:19:39Z")
I believe @sam made some tweaks to this, we didn’t like that “categories” was showing up as a breadcrumb itself. Here’s how it looked before that tweak
Seems some results are showing the new format with the changes:
Or maybe that’s only subcategories.. perhaps categories aren’t appearing now. Hard to say..
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2015, 12:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/8 "2015-06-14T00:16:32Z")
I think Google prefers not to show single categories for some crazy reason
The micro data is correct per their current recommendations
I also tweaked this so it does not add uncategorized and does add tags
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2015, 12:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/9 "2015-06-14T00:54:59Z")
Hmm how do tags work? They are not a hierarchy…
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2015, 1:15am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/10 "2015-06-14T01:15:25Z")
It just appends them after categories, keep in mind, prior to this tags were totally omitted from crawler payload
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### Author:  [@chapoi](https://meta.discourse.org/u/chapoi)
#### Post date: [December 4, 2025, 11:10am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/breadcrumbs-microformat-for-seo/14634/11 "2025-12-04T11:10:03Z")